Joel Sternfeld

The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily.

Photography has always been capable of manipulation.

Some people consider utopia to be derived from nature. For some people, utopia is the city.

I grew up in Belle Harbor, which is in New York City, but it has the most powerful sense of nature and seasons. It wasn't even the beach and the water. I just dreamt about everything that had to do with nature. I read about Thoreau.

No one can say how long the process of human extinction might take, but as it proceeds, the same global order will prevail that always prevails: rich nations will find ways to protect themselves and make themselves comfortable, while the poor nations and the poor people of the planet will suffer.

The digital print is becoming the look of our time, and it makes the C-print start to look like a tintype.

All of my work has been about ideas of utopia and dystopia. I think that's what gives America interest. It's many things all at once. It's such a complicated society.

When you have unity, I think it squares the reach or power of the work.

For me it was sort of career suicide to work in color, but I did it because I perceived myself from an early stage to be interested in seasonality - the changing of the seasons - that's what I deeply loved.

You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. No individual photo explains anything. That's what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.